About Biodiversity.fi

Biodiversity.fi provides up-to-date research-based information on the state and development of biological diversity in Finland. The web service has been created in close cooperation by Finnish research institutions, government authorities and non-governmental organisations. The service is open to anyone interested in the state of nature in Finland.

Besides a more general goal of disseminating biodiversity monitoring information to the public, the web service has been created to support national biodiversity related decision making and to fulfill Finland's international obligations. Finland is obliged both by the Convention on Biological Diversity's goal to significantly reduce the current rate of biodiversity loss and the even more ambitious EU goal to entirely halt the loss biodiversity by 2010. One of the main aims of this web site is to assess progress towards these goals.

Biodiversity.fi is based on the use of indicators. Quantitative indicators enable us to keep track of some of the most important and best-known changes in nature in a condensed and easy to understand format.

The indicators of Biodiversity.fi are the result of many years development efforts. Since 2006 indicators have been developed in project of the Finnish Environmental Cluster Research Programme which is financed by the Ministry of the Environment. This work is being coordinated by researchers from the Finnish Environment Institute. Other partners include the Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute, Finnish Museum of Natural History, Finnish Forest Research Institute (Metla), BirdLife Finland, South Karelia Allergy and Environment Institute and Metsähallitus Natural Heritage Services. You can find more information on the project from here.

In addition to the partners listed above many other research institutions, government bodies and NGOs take part in the development and updating of the indicators. A full list of participants including a brief description of their role can be accessed from here. One of the goals of the indicator collection and of Biodiversity.fi is to increase cooperation amongst various data providers and governmental sectors. Among other things, we have sought to highlight the importance of cooperation by placing these pages on an independent domain and not as a part of any one institution's home pages.

We hope that Biodiversity.fi will encourage volunteers to take part in monitoring schema such as the national bird, butterfly or game animal transect counts. A considerable amount of data provided by such monitoring programmes have been utilised here as a measures of the overall development of biodiversity for the first time. It has been estimated that approximately 70% of all biodiversity related monitoring work is carried out by volunteered experts and enthusiasts.